Deadly Sight (21 page)

“I’m in,” Sam announced quietly.

Dang. That password-decrypting gadget she’d received in the mail yesterday was as good as she’d said it was. The device was something Jeff’s people had designed and Sam swore by. He moved over to her side and ducked under the black hood with her. The intimacy of it caught him by surprise, but he forced his intense awareness of her aside. Still. It felt good to stand close to her again.

She was scrolling rapidly through a file directory.

“Just copy the whole mess. We can look through it later,” he ordered.

She nodded, plugged in a flash drive and typed a series of commands. While she did that, he continued his search of the building. Storage cabinets and toolboxes didn’t yield any interesting finds.

“Any luck on the tunnel?” she asked quietly.

He snorted. The thing was impossible to miss. A huge bundle of orange extension cords led right to it, and a big fan stood not far from the opening. The tunnel was a good eight feet in diameter and headed straight down into the ground. “It’s over here.”

He expected her to join him, but glanced over at her when she didn’t. She was standing in front of some sort of workbench, examining something small and electrical-looking. Whatever it was, she jammed it in her pocket and continued over to him. Even clothed entirely in black, nondescript leggings and a turtleneck, she was stunning, a shapely shadow in a sea of lime-green.

“There’s a ladder,” he murmured. “I’ll go down first.”

The vertical shaft turned out to be short, four feet or so down to what turned out to be a ledge. Another ladder led down to a second, lower level. And it was off this that a tunnel extended away into the dark.

He started forward into the blackness. The scale of the tunnel was staggering. Although it wasn’t much more than shoulder-width for him, it was easily seven feet tall. He had plenty of headroom, even with wires and air ducting overhead.

Moving cautiously and keeping a sharp eye out for booby traps, they made their way forward. They’d been walking for maybe ten minutes when the tunnel widened out into a small room of sorts. They flashed their lights all around the space but saw nothing special about it.

“I think this is just a turnaround or rest area,” he announced.

“Let me go first. We’ll move faster,” Sam replied.

He nodded and she took off down the tunnel quickly. They’d been striding along briskly for maybe five minutes when another area opened up. And this one had electric lights installed. They found the switch and a widely spaced row of bulbs illuminated on down the tunnel. More interesting, a set of steel tracks wound off into the gloom. A small cart not much larger than a wheelbarrow sat at the end of the track.

“Wanna ride?” Sam asked.

“May as well. There’s no telling how far this thing goes.”

“It’s quite the excavation project,” she commented as they climbed into the little railcar. He picked up the remote control lying inside it and pushed the green button. The cart lurched into motion, dumping Sam in his lap. “Uhh, sorry,” she grunted as she scrambled to right herself and push away from him all without touching him any more than she had to.

“Oh, for Pete’s sake. Stop squirming.”

She froze against him.

“Just turn around and sit down in my lap. It’ll be more comfortable for both of us because I’ll have somewhere to put my legs.”

She did as he suggested without comment. And all of a sudden, the train ride seemed to go on forever. She smelled good. Even though she was tense against him, she felt as feminine and sexy as ever. The only sensible thing to do with his arms was to put them around her waist. If he wasn’t mistaken, she snuggled a little closer before she went ramrod-stiff against him.

“Relax already,” he muttered. “I won’t bite you.”

She drew a quick breath, no doubt to make a snappy comeback, but then said merely, “How long do you suppose it took them to dig this thing?”

“They must have worked on it for months. Years, maybe. That scaffolding supporting the ceiling looks like they expect the tunnel to be here for a while, too.”

She nodded, looking up. “They wouldn’t go to all this trouble if they were planning a one-time sabotage of the computer cables.”

Sam was absolutely right. What on earth were these people up to? As the ride continued, she wiggled in his lap without warning. For an alarmed and thrilled second, he thought she was making a grab for his male parts. But sadly, she was only digging in her pocket for something.

She said eagerly, “Look what I found.”

He pointed his cyalume stick at a small object she held out in her palm. It was no larger than his thumbnail. “What’s that?”

“A radio,” she announced triumphantly.

“What do you suppose it’s for?”

“This.” She pulled a second object out of her pocket. It was a thin pile of nylon with a buckle. She held it up and it resolved into a harness-like contraption a person might walk a dog in, but smaller. Rabbit-size. Or squirrel-size. And it had a tiny pouch sewn onto it where a radio could ride the wearer’s back.

“Proctor’s attaching radios to the animals he rescues?” Gray asked.

“They’re not just radios. They’re jammers.”

“Come again?” he asked, surprised.

She flipped the tiny radio over. “This is a signal jammer. It emits a specific frequency in a concentrated burst that would totally jam one frequency or a small range of frequencies.”

That would explain all those radio bursts randomly knocking out the Shady Grove and Byrd Observatory antennas. And when investigators went to the source of the signal, they always found nothing.
Animals
were wearing the radios. Proctor was turning the radios on somehow, probably remotely, and then turning them off after a minute or two. The harnessed animals would move on to a new location, and nobody was the wiser as to where the signal had come from. It was actually ingenious.

“What kind of range do you think those radios might have?” he asked.

She grinned up at him. “If a short in a heating pad can kick the big antennas offline, these wouldn’t have to be powerful at all to screw up the antenna arrays at the observatory and at Shady Grove.”

“Okay. Then why does Proctor want to screw up the antenna arrays?”

The cart chose that moment to lurch to a stop, throwing him forward against Sam. “Sorry,” he mumbled.

“No sweatskie. Let’s find out what’s at the end of the line, shall we?”

Her enthusiasm was contagious. They didn’t have all the pieces yet, but he could feel Proctor’s plan falling into place around them. The tunnel ended maybe a dozen yards beyond the track in a third widened area in the tunnel.

More lightbulbs were clustered in metal cages here, and Sam put on a pair of sunglasses. While she adapted, he took a look around. A rough table to one side of the space held two surprisingly state-of-the-art computers and a tower that would hold a good-size computer server. He glanced up at the ceiling at the far end of the room.

“Bingo,” he announced.

“What’ve you got?” Sam moved over beside him to gaze upward. “Ahh.”

Yup. Ahh. A twelve-inch steel pipe had a gaping hole cut in it, revealing rubber lining and cables. Lots and lots of cables. And some sort of small box was nestled among the mass. Thin wires led from the box directly into the backs of the two computers on the table.

Sam leaned in, studying the connections closely. “How weird! That box is not actually tapping into any of the cables. It’s just sitting beside them. But Proctor has stripped away the insulation around the fiber-optic cables next to the box-thingie.”

“Any guess as to what the box-thingie does?” he asked dryly.

Frowning, she moved over to the table. “Let’s see if we can find out.” She turned on one of the systems and it booted up without needing a password. Proctor must be pretty confident of his security if he didn’t bother protecting these systems. Sam browsed the computer’s contents for a minute or two when a strange screen popped up in front of her.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t this look like a power monitoring program?”

He frowned. “Yes. It does.”

And then it hit him. “They’re not breaking into the information flow from the antennas to the computer arrays. They’re only watching when the information is flowing.”

“Now why would they care about that?” Sam mumbled.

He frowned. Radios that would jam signals. Computers that would tell when the signals were stopped or not. “Why would someone shut down the antenna arrays intentionally and go to all this trouble to check that they were down?”

Sam stared at him, her sunglasses giving away nothing. “What are the two things nobody can do in range of the big antennas without getting caught?”

“Use electricity, for one. What’s the other?”

“Easy,” she answered. “Send messages. No phone call or wireless signal in North America can get past Shady Grove’s antennas.”

A chill rushed through him. They were on the right track now. The next obvious question was, “Who does Proctor want to call so privately that he’s gone to all this trouble to knock the antennas offline and verify that they’re offline?”

“No idea. Let’s see if there’s an answer in here,” Sam offered as she began to type.

He waited and watched while she typed. Finally, she stopped on what looked like the readout from a seismic sensor. It was a wildly varying scribble that crawled across the screen. “I don’t know if this is important, but it looks like this might have to do with a radio signal. I can’t tell what it’s measuring, though.”

As a longtime NSA employee, he took one look at the screen and knew precisely what he was looking at. “That’s a record of signal bursts from satellites. They send an initial signal—this blip here—then pause to align themselves with the ground station. Then, after this short delay—the flat line here—they commence the body of the transmission, which is done in a microwave relay. That’s all this electronic activity here. When the satellite’s done talking, it sends this final burst to show it’s done. The ground station sends a termination reply—here—and voila. One complete satellite transmission.”

“Who’s making the transmissions?” Sam asked.

“That’s a hell of a good question. Can you find any kind of signature that can tell us what specific satellite this program is tracking?”

Sam poked around for a minute. “Does GSAT-12 mean anything to you?”

He swore softly. “Yes. That’s a state-of-the-art communications satellite.”

“So why is Proctor watching a communications satellite?” Sam asked.

Gray stared at her and she stared back. He reached out with both hands and gently removed her sunglasses so he could look directly into her eyes. Worry made them dark gold.

She spoke slowly, clearly thinking as she went. “If I wanted to make phone calls that wouldn’t be monitored by Echelon, I’d have to turn Echelon off, right?”

He nodded, appalled. His intuition shouted that she was spot-on.

“So how would I turn it off?” she continued. “I’d cause interference that kicked its antennas offline. Enter the bunnies and their signal jammers. And then I’d devise some way to measure whether or not I’d succeeded in kicking the system offline. When I knew Echelon was shut down, I’d make my phone call. If I got a warning that Echelon had come back up online, I’d cut off my call fast.”

“But in the meantime, I’d have had a window to speak privately without any government agency overhearing me.” He added heavily, “From anywhere in North America.”

Sam nodded. “If you were a bad guy, what would you want to talk about without Uncle Sam hearing you?”

“I can think of a bunch of things,” he replied grimly, “and none of them are legal or good for our country.”

She nodded. “I could keep that ability to make unmonitored phone calls all to myself, or if I were an enterprising sort of bad guy, I could sell phone calls to all my bad guy friends and make enough money to support a snazzy compound full of hippies to be my cover.”

His stomach sank, a sure sign that his instinct recognized truth in her words. “I do believe you’ve got it, Sam. We’re sitting on the phone company for Bad Guys Are Us. Can you find any proof of it on that computer?”

“I’m going to copy the whole hard drive of this system, too, and sort it out later. I expect we’ll find a log of phone calls somewhere on this puppy. I just don’t know where to look.”

“Fair enough. The NSA’s going to have a field day with this.”

She copied the contents of the hard drives of both computers onto a flash disk and did something to one of the computers that made her chortle quietly to herself.

“Dare I ask what you’re doing?” he murmured.

“I planted a virus in their system. In case we don’t make it out of here tonight. In a few days, this thing is going to be so tied in knots they won’t know which end is up.”

“Where did this virus come from?” he asked, surprised.

“I had a copy of it on that flash drive I just filled up with Proctor’s data. Best hackers in the biz created it.”

“You’re an evil woman, Sammie Jo Jessup.”

“And don’t you ever forget it,” she mumbled in distraction as she shut down the computers.

She had a point. Even he tended to underestimate her. She could definitely take care of herself and wasn’t the kind of helpless female he would worry about being taken advantage of when he wasn’t around to look out for her. Not like Emily—

No, not like Emily at all.

Shock registered that he’d managed to think of Sam and Emily in the same breath and not be overwhelmed by guilt. Each in their own way was special and unique, but the two women were so different he would never confuse the two of them.

“Ready to blow this popsicle stand?” Sam asked jauntily.

“Yup. Let’s do it.”

They piled back into the wheelbarrow-size cart. This time Sam settled into his lap without his having to ask. Optimism oozed from her, and he caught himself soaking it up without thinking.

He was supposed to be depressed, dammit. Shut down emotionally. But darned if she didn’t wake him up inside just with her presence. She wasn’t saying or doing a blessed thing. Just sitting in his lap. But energy buzzed off her like warmth on a sunny day. She truly was a force of nature.